New Year miscellanea
Christmas came and went mostly without incident; we had one friend over, and phoned a couple of others. I had the week between Christmas and New Year's off, and we caught up on a lot of TV series: the Mandalorian, ST Discovery, Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts, Dragon Prince, Hilda, the new She-Ra, and just this weekend, the Doctor Who New Year's special. I really enjoyed all of them, in different ways. The biggest "Oh, WOW!" moment was on Discovery, when the...let's say the entity that they took Georgieau to revealed who/what it really was. Both Kathy and I literally shouted "Oh, WOW!" at the television. But the last episode of The Mandalorian was a close second.
One subtler thing that pleased me was on the Dragon Prince. See, over the last year, we'd also watched Avatar: The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra, which was produced in the 00s, and we're still going through the new She-Ra (because we're only watching it once a week with a friend, it's going slower) which was produced in the mid-teens. Both of those shows have same-sex relationships. In The Legend of Korra, it's on the order of Ivanova/Talia in Babylon 5; it's there, but if you blink, you'll miss it. The characters barely interact in the season in which they supposedly fall for each other. The romance is not so much subtextual as absent, and you can easily read it as them being just good friends.
In She-Ra, the characters have a much more intense relationship, and the romantic subtext is much more front and center. The subtext finally becomes text only in the very last episode of the show.
In Kipo, and in The Dragon Prince, which were produced over the last two to three years, the characters in same-sex relationships are just. In them. They're married. Or dating. Or fighting to the death over a lava waterfall but at the last minute saving each other because OBVIOUSLY WHAT GENERAL AMAYA NEEDS IS A HOT SUN ELF GIRLFRIEND.
And that, especially for someone my age, is seriously cool.
(That said, all the people who were trying to sell me on Kipo when it first came out and said I should watch it because it had great representation, what you should have said was, "The main character is a WERE-MEGA-JAGUAR, and it's got great representation." Always lead with the were-mega-jaguar.)
And on a final note, if the shenanigans of the Republicans actually do result in postponing the inauguration, and we get President Pelosi for even a few hours, I am going to laugh my ass off.
Rants Talk to me
One subtler thing that pleased me was on the Dragon Prince. See, over the last year, we'd also watched Avatar: The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra, which was produced in the 00s, and we're still going through the new She-Ra (because we're only watching it once a week with a friend, it's going slower) which was produced in the mid-teens. Both of those shows have same-sex relationships. In The Legend of Korra, it's on the order of Ivanova/Talia in Babylon 5; it's there, but if you blink, you'll miss it. The characters barely interact in the season in which they supposedly fall for each other. The romance is not so much subtextual as absent, and you can easily read it as them being just good friends.
In She-Ra, the characters have a much more intense relationship, and the romantic subtext is much more front and center. The subtext finally becomes text only in the very last episode of the show.
In Kipo, and in The Dragon Prince, which were produced over the last two to three years, the characters in same-sex relationships are just. In them. They're married. Or dating. Or fighting to the death over a lava waterfall but at the last minute saving each other because OBVIOUSLY WHAT GENERAL AMAYA NEEDS IS A HOT SUN ELF GIRLFRIEND.
And that, especially for someone my age, is seriously cool.
(That said, all the people who were trying to sell me on Kipo when it first came out and said I should watch it because it had great representation, what you should have said was, "The main character is a WERE-MEGA-JAGUAR, and it's got great representation." Always lead with the were-mega-jaguar.)
And on a final note, if the shenanigans of the Republicans actually do result in postponing the inauguration, and we get President Pelosi for even a few hours, I am going to laugh my ass off.
Rants Talk to me